AdSense Categories

After reading through the comments of a post over at ProBlogger this morning I decided to try and add a few categories to some of my AdSense ads for improved tracking purposes. My initial attempt didn’t work very well though because when I went to check my category reports they reported no data.

Originally I had tried adding a category name to a pre-existing AdSense block so I decided to start from scratch and create a new code block directly with the AdSense customization tool. It was then that I discovered that Google actually assigns a number to represent the category in the code block rather the text string name and that was source of my problem. That seems like kind of an unfortunate design choice on Google’s part since it makes using, changing and reassigning categories that much more complicated. At least now that I know how categories work in the ad blocks I can deal with them properly even if it is a pain.